The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
From Glenn Reynolds, on people ignoring assault weapons bans:
But since the point of gun control is to humiliate and grind down flyover people and demonstrate that the Ruling Class is ultimately the, well, Ruling Class — not to control crime — the appearance of submission is probably enough. Plus, a seldom enforced and often ignored law is ideal if you want to be able to target troublesome individuals later.
That pretty effectively sums it up.
I remember writing a while back, though I can’t find it now, that one reason the anti-gun movement could be dismissed as astroturf with very little in the way of a real movement behind it is because the big indicators of a true cultural struggle were absent. If there were real, motivated opposition, you’d see them attacking our core cultural institutions.
I’m sorry to say, but we’re starting to see that. Now, I do believe that social media has greatly enhanced the ability of a small number of determined activists to intimidate traditional companies who don’t really get social media. But in 2008, they did not have even a small number of determined activists. I believe we are seeing a resurgence of the gun control movement, and the time to get serious is now.
Yes, I am skeptical those poll numbers linked are so out of whack with what we’ve seen in the past even after mass shootings, but I’d note the shift here is almost exclusively women. I notice a few issues with this poll’s questioned, but it doesn’t look like the hatchet job I wish it did. To steel yourselves and start organizing. We’re going to need to all hang together over the next few months. It never hurts to start communicating with your reps.
It looks like the big thing we have to worry about post-Parkland is going to be a move to raise the age for buying a long gun from 18 to 21. I’ll be honest, telling a 20 year old kid who’s coming back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan that he’s responsible enough to use an M4 to shoot Taliban for God and Country, but not responsible enough to own a semi-automatic AR-15 to shoot paper or to say, defend his family after a natural disaster, does not sit well with me at all. Are we going to repeal the 26th Amendment? Because if they aren’t responsible enough to own a rifle, why are they responsible enough to vote? Maybe we shouldn’t let them join the military either. Maybe we should raise the age you can get married without parental permission back to 21, like it used to be in many states?
This is bullshit. If you’re old enough to die for your country, you’re old enough to vote for or against the people who would send you, old enough to have a beer, get married, and yes, own a gun. If we’re now talking about moving the age of majority back to 21, and maybe we should (we have an awful lot of man and women children running around out there) we ought to have that serious conversation about that. Otherwise, this is just another case of the Second Amendment, to borrow from Justice Thomas, being treated as “a disfavored right.”
And to make matters worse, it’s the fucking Republicans doing this to us. Not that I’m shocked. I’m way too cynical about politics to be shocked. But I can’t think of any better way to make me stay home, rather than lift a finger or even vote for your shitty, awful candidates.
The ATF, in a rare move, decided several months ago to enter the rule making process with the bump stock issue. There was even the required public comment period. I say rare, because ATF has never liked using rule making, choosing to do most regulation through determination letters. They traditionally prefer policy to regulation.
Now the big deal is that Trump called for a bump stock ban, probably because NRA called for a bump stock ban, and there’s already a rule making process going on that’s headed in that direction. NRA called for a bump stock ban because in Congress, the votes were there to pass one, and all the Congressional bills I saw on the topic were overly broad and sucked. They would have made any gun smithing work on a semi-automatic firearm legally risky, and that’s before you get into the multitudes of constructive possession issues.
So what do you do? Call on ATF to undertake rule making, where you can control the process under a friendly administration, and make sure whatever comes out is narrowly worded. Also, since it’s regulation, rather than law, it’s much easier to change.
So that was the choice: a bump stock ban that swept in a lot other ordinary and legal activity, and a bump stock ban that was just a bump stock ban, and was regulation rather than law. There are no other options. Don’t like that? Then you’re left replacing many of the squishy Republicans. But you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone running for office in this country willing to stand up and shout, “Yay for machine guns,” let alone win on it. And if you challenge all the squishy Republicans and lose? You’re done. Finished. Bump stocks ain’t a hill I’m dying on, and trust me, it is a hill you’ll die on.
I’m sure criminals will roil at the idea that they’ll no longer be able to buy firearms out of the back of a van with a Visa or a Master Card. This is aimed squarely at law abiding gun owners:
What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?
I think they overestimate how much leverage they have over the industry. If forced to, I’ll pay cash for guns. In fact, I’ll make it a point to buy more as a fuck you to the financial industry. I haven’t really been buying for a while. I have little doubt such a move would cause industry upheaval, but it would survive. Maybe Cabela’s wouldn’t, but the industry would.
People hate banks. If the banks and financial industry suddenly “got woke” and started believing their job is to enforce social justice, I’m going to push my lawmakers to start enforcing some anti-trust and bust up all these financial conglomerates.
Critics of using the finance industry to influence gun sales might argue that such a move would be discriminatory against gun retailers. But gun sellers are not a protected class, like age, race, gender, religion or even political affiliation. This would be a strictly commercial decision.
Want to bet on how quickly we can make it one?
Lame duck governor whose political career is at an end didn’t used to like assault weapons, then liked them, and now decides that once again he doesn’t like them. It bears repeating: politicians very rarely come to this issue out of any real personal conviction. It is almost always based on a calculation of political expedience. When banning assault weapons was all the rage even among a lot of Republican politicians in the early 1990s, Kasich liked himself some assault weapons bans. When the 1994 Federal AWB laid the foundation for our return to political power, Kasich flipped and declared himself a darling of the NRA, and gladly took our endorsement. Now that his political career is over, he has plainly laid out that he’s not really a gun guy, and all those NRA endorsein’ and assault weapon lovin’ was just a show.
Oh well, whether he likes it or not, he signed a lot of stuff that’s good for gun owners. Remember, just because your girlfriend is a whore doesn’t mean you can’t get laid. Remember Uncle Milty:
So many gun control advocates really do believe that the only reason guns aren’t banned yet is because of the NRA. They really do not understand that we’re bigger than the NRA. NRA membership is held by only a few of the millions of gun owners and pro-gun people. It’s not a top-down organization that tells us to jump. We tell the organization to jump.
A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts of very specific ideas that people with different backgrounds and connections in the pro-gun community could take to protect their rights. There’s a good chance that some of those ideas need to be dusted off.
Here’s the list for:
If any readers tried some of these suggestions, feel free to share how they went over. Not every idea will work for every situation, but this should cover a great number of ways to engage people who are otherwise intimidated by the process of fighting gun control.
I’ve said a lot over the years on this topic, read a lot of polls, seen a lot of focus group studies, and probably jumped to a lot of conclusions. Lately, one thing is standing out to me about how we keep our shooting culture: the biggest predictor I’ve noticed on whether your support gun control or not is “Do you own a gun?”
If the answer is “yes,” chances are you’re not real big on gun control, and good chance you’re very opposed to it. If the answer is “no,” good chance you support at least some gun control, and likely a lot. The only better predictor is political party, but my guess is that’s a following indicator rather than a leading indicator.
So we have to build our activism in the issue around how to get more people answering that question with a “yes.” Lately, I’ve been thinking this matters a lot more than spending hours on the Internet arguing policy, or proffering this study or that study that shows our opponents are wrong. The good news is there are a lot of ways to contribute to making more people answer that question with a “yes.” The bad news is that about 1/3rd of Americans, and this number is growing, live in jurisdictions where they make it very difficult to accomplish turning “noes” to “yeses.”
If there’s one thing I wish I could get across to gun owners who are OK with a little gun control: there really can’t be any lasting compromise. Compromise is something that happens through struggle, not something you plan or negotiate in good faith. We’re living in a compromise. Gun owners in New Jersey are about to find out how the compromises forced on them have reduced the number of people who answer “yes” to such a low level they are powerless to avoid ruin. New Jersey almost certainly is not minting very many new gun owners; the process to become one is onerous and intimidating to newbs. New Jersey gave the state the mechanism by which to strangle gun ownership in 1966 when they adopted a permitting system for handguns, and a licensing system for long guns. New York City adopted it’s ratchet in the early 20th century, and has gone further along this path than New Jersey. Gun ownership has effectively been eliminated in the Five Boroughs. That’s 8 million people who are never going to answer “yes.” You’ll never get them there because of the legal barriers.
Despite the long standing nature of licensing and permitting in New York City and New Jersey, most of the real onerous restrictions didn’t come about until the 1990s. That was a pivotal time for our struggle. In most jurisdictions, there was push back, and we pushed hard enough, and had enough people pushing, to get the box cars back over the hump. In others, there were already mechanisms in place to squeeze gun owners, and they did not make it back over the hump. There just weren’t enough people left to push, because those mechanisms, adopted years ago managed to thumb the scale just enough to give the gun control movement an opportunity they didn’t have in other states.
But even if we were to sweep aside all of New Jersey and New York’s gun laws tomorrow, it would be a long slog to make any headway. Why? There’s nowhere to shoot in New York. In New Jersey, places to shoot are becoming scarce as the generation of gun owners who were minted under less oppression either die off, leave the state, or give up shooting entirely. Once we lose those places, we’re not getting them back. A healthy culture can die just of neglect, without any new gun control.
Now we are at another pivotal moment. The restrictive states are in the process of finishing off their shooting cultures entirely. Most shooters left in New Jersey after Murphy is done with them will be breaking the law in some manner. I’d be rich if I had a dime for every time I heard a New Jersey gun owner at my club say something like: “Fuck Murphy, I’m done playing these games. I’m just going to lay low and ignore all this bullshit.” That will probably work for the vast majority, and that’s what’s happened largely in Connecticut and Upstate New York after the rash of new gun bans after Sandy Hook. But I wish they’d realize that some of you will get unlucky in traffic stops, get the wrong cop, be made examples of, and sent to prison. They won’t come door-to-door. They don’t have to. They will wait you out, and let you die off. They will be patient, and that strategy will work over the long term.
You might say, “Well, Jersey’s gonna Jersey.” But we are also on the verge of losing Washington State, and a few other states aren’t looking as safe as they used to. The true overarching issue we’re facing, more than anything, is urbanization, and that’s a nut we’re going to have to crack if we’re to win this thing long term. Much of our shooting culture is rural, and there’s a lot of momentum built up in the rural shooting culture. An Urban and Suburban gun culture in the 21st century will look different, and we’re just starting to figure that out. If we’re going to make Gun Ownership Great Again, we have to figure out how to make a lot more “yes” people. We don’t have a choice.
Governor Wolf may not have been expecting a fight over guns, but he sure as hell got one. There is a little known (outside of gun circles) provision in Pennsylvania law that when a state of emergency is declared, the only people who become eligible to possess firearms “on the public streets” are military, police, and people who have a License to Carry Firearms.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania has been hit particularly hard by opioid addiction. So naturally things will tend to follow the progression of politicians and pearl clutchers everywhere: this is a crisis of epic proportion, so Something Must Be Done. Declaring a State of Emergency over the opiods is Something, so therefore it Must Be Done.
There’s an effort growing to change the state of emergency law to remove the firearms ban. This would be a good idea. And since I believe the Governor did not intend to pick a fight on this issue, we might have a reasonable shot at getting him to sign it. It will also be interesting to see the gun control groups fight this, because of course having complex laws in place no one knows about means more people like you and me in prison, where no doubt many of them believe we belong.
It’s a good time, in the New Year and entering the 12th year of blogging, with 11 now behind me, to take a look at where we stand, and where we’re going. I am not as optimistic as many people, and I believe in some ways we’ve lost ground since I started blogging. Here are some observations:
So where does this leave the gun rights movement?
